Detroit

The muscle cars have aged out

of high school hamburger stands

and live in landfills

or junkyards

but some survive.

The codger across the street in the end house

keeps his in pristine condition,

replacing its parts, babying its body

in ways he can't do for himself.

I see him rolling out down the street,

into youth,

joy,

music,

health,

until he rounds the corner

and disappears.

_____

A Conversation About a Dog

 "I see that I'm too late," I said

"You don't see a damn thing. Open your eyes," he said. 

There was a train due, or that had already departed, or

that never was, or that was, but had long since gone.

"I think about the dog. A lot. I miss the dog."

"There was no dog," he said, taking a drag.

"Think about it," he added, blowing smoke my way.

There was a dog, but not his dog, or not the dog

he thought I meant, which we never had. 

"There was a dog." I was determined, and a little angry.

He laughed and took off his hat, dangling it from his hand.

"Whatever you say, you fucking crazy bitch."

Trains look small at a distance, deadly from up close.

There is time for one to become the other, either way.

I didn't answer. I wore a veil like a death mask.

I wore a small tam like a zucchetto. Pax vobiscum. 

"Wait here forever if you want, I'm leaving," he said

and stood up, but lingered, finishing his unfiltered.

"You still love me. I know you do," I said softly, viciously.

"You don't know shit. Try opening your mail sometimes."

There are letters that form words, others that stand for things;

letters one saves for years, others forgotten on a hall table.

"I miss that dog. he was a good dog," I said,

but there was no one there, and the station was gone.

__________

belatedly for Dora's Dverse Poetics: Dialogue It In! I will share with OLN. 

Image: Kate Bishop and Lucky the Pizza Dog

Music: Lydia Gray Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word

Wishbone

 

When I was young, I learned the art of

decisions made with wishbones. 

A living heart had informed them

with a love of yellow corn and a fear of silver hatchets. 

I came out of my shell one night during 

a traffic accident like waking during surgery.

Wrecked Chevies turn shy as little girls

but their drivers find illumination in oil and blood and pavement. 

Jail and church are cousins and I found

in one what had eluded me in the other. 

That morning they returned my effects.

A crow had nested inside my leather satchel like swag from limbo.

Why bring all of this up? Why now, when

October is just a penny on the railroad track

shiny and done with, like an old flame?

I guess I'm just telling how I got here, the whole swerve of my life.

Living alone takes nerve, more than I ever had young.

Magic never gets the laundry done, or the

chicken fried, but I have it in spades these

rainy days, when my hawk-heart feels the wishbone

and I wonder what it will tell about me, how it will split

between sweetheart and shrew, drunk and duena,

all the spilled tiles and tears that depicted my face,

the one I wore while here, doing the best I could, grandmother and memory.

________

for Word Garden Word List--She Had Some Horses

Music: Katey Sagal Bird On The Wire. 

The Bogus Line

 

You crawl along the marrow in my long bones

and at the base of my skull, whispering in my ear.

You crawl between my legs 

and curl around my teeth and fingernails.

"Let's get fucked up." 

Even after all this time, 

there you are, my old frenemy

offering your false comfort.

I'm not the lonesome kid that I was anymore,

the one who skipped the day when they taught the language

that gets you in and gets you by.

I was with my almost-twin, the future suicide.

"Let's check out," 

The worst I'm gonna do is oversleep,

so save it, killer. 

I know you're lying cos your lips are moving.

You're the dark alley with roses at the way in.

You're the lover with zip ties in the pillowcase.

I'm the woman walking alone for miles and miles and miles. 

I'm the woman who knows your moves and bogus line.

I'm not the lonesome kid I was anymore

but never learned the language, so made up my own--

It's killer stuff and I'm

whistling past the graveyard on my way home. 

_______________-

I went looking for a poetry prompt and found one HERE. I used #3, to describe the sensation of listening to a favorite song in a language you don't understand. I chose Patricia's Mes Reves de Satin (Nights In White Satin.) I do know some French, but I'm not fluent. 

Promenade In Green & Gray

 

Spring is the season of madness,

as fine and also bitter as any high always is in the end.

Every doomed thing that grows boasts in beauty,

and who wouldn't finger the new green blades?

who wouldn't close their eyes in the warm stranger sun and sigh?

Every heart is a blind radio, and what good is the word or song

without someone to hear it, turn toward it,

and seem to know the meaning?

Summer is a fever we invite, because we long to be feverish.

What fool thinks a bonfire will burn a hundred years? 

Look, legions of fools consumed by the thing that feeds them,

vanishing because we long to vanish, and then crying, lost, surprised.

In autumn, I have felt myself fall in a million pieces, until I stood

naked as any idiot tree. I was beautiful in a million ways,

pick me up, press me in pages, even just one leaf between leaves,

but I end up with all the others, up against some fence, silent, far from home. 

Winter is the season of stillness, and those who have stored up sorrows

find they do not lack for much. Snowy ground makes others much clearer--

where they've come from, where they're headed. There's no need anymore

to build with strips and shreds, we become our own nest and wait,

astonished and patient, a quiet station at rest in the moonlight. 

_______________

for Desperate Poets "Desperately Different". 

Title adapted from the song Green Rocky Road

Music: The Motels Only The Lonely

Nursery Rhyme

 There were devils

present at my birth

and veiled angels

in smoky violet shirts

with handbells

they'd stolen out of Hell.

Who is the coward

that devils teach to curse

holding Hope out in a teacup

but overturn it first?

A fool's sun

wanes fast, warms none.

See the rose stem

my assassin's throat was vase for

so that every imprecation

that's spoken only makes more

melodies

across my garden's leaves.

Angels kept my heart

in a box with golden hinges

carried by a devil

on its back with burning cinches

in tandem served--

my hidden heart preserved. 

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Stephen Crane

Music: Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa "I'll Take Care of You"

Vagabond Ball

 You can lose the colored ball that rolls under the fence and into the weeds.

You can lose the puppy you slept with, the blanket, the bed, the parents as well.

You can lose your shoes when the roommate stretches them,

lose your virginity and barely remember it,

lose your bestie, your internship, your single room, your shine.

You can lose a husband or wife, that bastard, that bitch.

You can lose your tolerance, your keys, your court case, your kids.

You can lose yourself and wonder how in the hell.

You can lose and not be able to let it go.

You can lose your shit, or sigh and say, "oh well."

You can lose your composure when you see how far you fell.

You can lose the booze, the dope, the sex, the waste.

You can lose the name you started with and choose another one

that doesn't have the sting and shame, the stopper and the bung.

You can lose the demon and shame the devil.

You can lose who you weren't and gain who you are,

no matter how unexpected, how hard, how glorious, how far.

Your soul's the same, untouched after all,

waiting in the weeds with the vagabond ball.

_____

my attempt at "a little repetition" for dverse. 

Ten Years In Five Lines

babe, around my heart

a rusty saw tooth of words

both spoken and unspoken

venoms the sugar core--

the magnolia darks to blackthorn.

---------

a Wayra for Dverse Poetry Form.

note-the berries of the blackthorn (sloe) plant can be eaten, but the seeds are toxic.

Patos Extraños

We are odd ducks, motherless

full of gunpowder and honey.

We see everything onrushing,

through the prism of a bus windscreen,

drinking to stop the chatter,

always bumming a dollar and then drawing on it,

turning it otherworldly, gorgeous, useless.

Dead brothers rise up from their graves

as we try to have dinner, watch tv.

"They're weird," say the women 

in their housedresses and galoshes,

whose dreams are unyielding as can openers.

A woman is expected to be beautiful,

a man stoic.

Where does that leave us?

Gauguin never came around again after the thing with the ear.

Mothers die, Lorca wants to kiss you,

and Diego fucks everything that's not nailed down.

We live in a snow globe inside a tornado funnel.

We are divine strays

leaving tracks on new sidewalk,

ducking thrown shoes from a holy or profane hand.

Here we are in Vinnie's car,

seeing swirls and jagged edges,

bizarre permutations and fields of flowers

in some cop's mirror shades.

The New Mexico night seems to bless us

as the cop lets us off with a warning,

his common brand of gibberish 

as foreign to us as ours is to him.

_______

for Sunday Muse #131.

Migration Patterns of Leos

Twice each year,

we migrate.

As a child my parents drove

from Mexico to Michigan every spring,

then back in fall.

Dirt roads, blacktop,

Nesbitt's orange

and Stroh's Bohemian for dad.

"Again? For fuck's sake," says my sig other, encouragingly.

Sig Other is sober, stable,

uncomplaining.

I gift him this shared happiness

and kindly drive.

______

for Sunday Muse #128 and Flash 55.

Dharma Baby

With milk stirred into my tomato soup, I was wild as a landscaped yard,
worldly as a tabby kitten.
Still, venomous lies thorned my pulse with the odd fist thrown in for punctuation.

Staying corner-quiet as the vacuum slammed the baseboards a room away,
I searched for a kind of touch on the bottom book shelves.
As soon as I could, I went feral, a lonesome library hider ghosting the book store, on my way to a gifting high of pages and substances,
a bad apple for a sick teacher.

Kerouac and other people's cars, coolers of beer,
paperbacks on the back seat, center lines snaking by,
these were my caduceus and my catechism.
I ate Vonnegut,
drank Brautigan,
shot up Burroughs,
fucked Ferlinghetti but not my road companions.

My boozy keepers kept me from a thousand mistakes.
Off all summer from their classrooms, 
they had no wives to explain shit to, 
just me in the hungover mornings, useless and funny as a three-legged cat.

I almost died.
Wrote some tripe in blood and got it published.
Joined a book club and the human race,
married wrong, raised a child,
kept my books like holy relics, poetry bones on which I learned to stand and stumble and survive.

I built a new heart out of sentences,
slept with other women,
changed my name, went too far but did it sober.
"Why do you keep these old books?"
Because they are life rafts,
holy texts,
soul food,
lovers who never leave.
They are me and I am them, a bad crowd lit with halos.

You can go if you want,
I am beyond injury anymore.
The nurses here make bedding from chapbooks,
whisper soft as pages turning,
are immortal,
and know my name.

4/18/2020
________________

for the Sunday Muse #104 where I am hosting.